The Dark Net Read Online Free Page B

unsuspecting sysop.
Usenet Flame Wars
    Around the same time that the BBS was invented, two academics at Duke University set themselves an even more ambitious task. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis were aggrieved that the Arpanet was elite and expensive – access cost approximately $100,000 per year – so in 1979 they set up a new network called ‘Usenet’, which, they hoped, anyone could access and use. (Anyone, that is, who had a computer connected to the operating system UNIX, which amounted to very few people.)
    Usenet, it can be argued, is the birthplace of the modern troll. Usenetters – a small clutch of academics, students, Arpanauts and computer nerds – would take a pseudonym and join a ‘newsgroup’ full of strangers. Like BBS, anyone could start a Usenet group, but unlike BBS the administrators – the people who ran the whole network – had some control over which groups they would allow. The hope of harmony reigning was dashed almost immediately. Usenetters clashed with the haughty Arpanauts over How Things Should Be Done in this new space, with the Arpanauts declaring the new Usenet ‘trash’ to be ignorant and inexperienced. One simple spelling mistake would often instigate a chain reaction, resulting in months of users trading insults and picking apart each other’s posts.
    Usenetters were a rebellious bunch. In 1987, Usenet administratorsforced what became known as the ‘Great Renaming’, categorising all the haphazard groups into seven ‘hierarchies’. These were:
comp.*
(computing),
misc.*
(miscellaneous),
news.*
,
rec.*
(recreation),
sci.*
(science),
soc.*
(social) and
talk.*
– under which users could start their own relevant subgroups. To name the group, you took the main hierarchy name, and then added further categories. fn2 * John Gilmore, who would go on to co-found the cypherpunk movement with Tim May and Eric Hughes in 1992, wanted to start a group about drugs, called rec.drugs. His request was turned down by the administrators.
    So Gilmore and two experienced Usenetters created their own hierarchy, which would be free of censorship. They called it
alt
.*, short for alternative (it was also thought to stand for ‘anarchists, lunatics and terrorists’). Flaming became extremely popular on
alt.*
, and flamers would take pleasure in being cruel to other users in as creative and imaginative a way as possible. A 1990s Usenet troll called Macon used to respond to flames by posting a single, 1,500-word epic mash-up of creative insults he’d written over the years: ‘You are the unholy spawn of a bandy-legged hobo and a syphilitic camel. You wear strangely mismatched clothing with oddly placed stains . . .’ When, in 1993, a user named Moby asked the group alt.tasteless for advice about how to deal with a pair of cats on heat who were ruining his love life, he received an explosion of maniacal solutions, each more ludicrous than the last: do-it-yourself spaying, execution by handgun, incineration and, perhaps inevitably, sex with the cats.
    On both Usenet and BBS new idioms, rules and norms werebeing created. But it was a world that was about to be inundated. The early 1990s saw the number of internet users grow exponentially. And many new users would beeline straight for one of the most active and interesting places online:
alt.*
. Usenetters, irate at the sudden influx of immigrants, attempted to flush them out. In 1992, in the group alt.folklore.urban, a new type of flaming was mentioned for the first time, targeted at the recent arrivals: trolling. The idea was to ‘troll for newbies’ fn3
*
: an experienced user would post an urban myth or legend about Usenet in the hope of eliciting a surprised reaction from anyone new, thereby exposing their status. Caught you! The responder would thereafter be mercilessly mocked.
    With so many potential targets, flaming and trolling began to spread, and became increasingly sophisticated. Several groups dedicated to trolling were set up in
alt.*
In